Last year I was invited to submit a paper to a special issue of Religions, an on-line journal, on Transcendentalism and Religious Experience. Titled “That Which Was Ecstasy Shall Become Daily Bread,” the subject of the paper is the nature of Emerson’s mysticism and its subsequent influence on Unitarian theology in the 19th and 20th centuries. Emerson never called himself a mystic, but he believed that we are subject to ecstasies, or revelations of the Universal Mind common to all people. Such experiences represent “an influx of the Divine Mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the Individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the Sea of Life.” This experience—which can only be described as a mystical experience—is at the heart of all religions and common to all people.

Some have questioned whether Emerson was a mystic, since he did not seem to fit the mold of Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross. What is distinctive about Emerson’s mysticism is that it is non-sectarian, holistic and natural. For Emerson, God is impersonal, not personal, and immanent in the world, not apart from it. His brand of mysticism is best expressed in this passage from his famous essay, “The Over-Soul”: “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal one. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.”

Although Emerson realized that moments of illumination are few and far between, he found such moments to be of great significance. He also knew that they could not be summoned at will. Nevertheless, he believed that people could improve the odds of their reception through cultivating the soul. This he sought to do by engaging in the spiritual practices of self-culture. He thought that society would be enriched by those who were able to communicate the wisdom gained in such experiences, but he never considered that illumination was reserved for a certain class of persons. The biggest obstacle is “that the community in which we live will hardly bear to be told that every man should be open to ecstasy or a divine illumination, and his daily walk elevated by intercourse with the spiritual world.”

This is because daily life is lived on a mundane level. We are accustomed to dealing with the everyday world in a practical, pragmatic way. We get up in the morning and go about our business thinking that this is the only reality there is. Empirical ways of knowing predominate over intuitive modes of thought. It is for these reasons that Emerson felt our life, as we live it, is common and mean, and sought to find a proper balance between the realities of everyday life and the demands of the spirit, in the hope that, as put it in his 1840 Dial essay, “Thoughts on Modern Literature,” “that which was ecstasy shall become daily bread.”

In September Harvard Divinity School hosted a program on Henry Thoreau’s religious views. I was on a panel with Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life; Richard Higgins, author of Thoreau and the Language of Trees, and Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Hour of Land. What follows is a shortened version of my remarks that evening.

Barry M Andrews at HDS

This bicentennial year at least a dozen books have been published about Henry David Thoreau. This scholarship is a boon to those of us who feel that Thoreau is worth the effort to understand him better and discover more about his interests and subsequent influence on American life and culture.

The danger we encounter amidst the welter of information produced in the wake of this recent scholarship, as Rebecca Solnit points out in her essay on the “Thoreau Problem,” is that we will end up compartmentalizing him, as in Thoreau the writer, Thoreau the abolitionist, Thoreau the naturalist, and so on. Or, worse yet, bifurcating his life between the recluse of Walden Pond on the one hand and the tax-resister in the Concord jail on the other; or between the dreamy Transcendentalist of his youth and the hard-headed scientist of his later years. Thus, we fail to see how the myriad parts of his life are of a piece and hang together.

From my perspective as a minister and a student of Transcendentalism, the thread on which all the beads of Thoreau’s many-faceted life are strung is his idiosyncratic and unconventional faith—a dimension largely unexplored in Thoreau scholarship. Richard Higgins is one of the few to venture into this area. It is a major thread of Laura Walls’ recent biography as well.

Thoreau’s earliest religious views were informed by his Unitarian upbringing. He was baptized and catechized in Concord’s First Parish Church. His mother and father were members there. But he signed off from the church when he was a young man. By the time he entered college in 1833, he was perhaps not a devout Unitarian, but his Harvard education was nevertheless steeped in Unitarian tradition, the school having been a training ground for over a generation of Unitarian ministers. Many of his professors were noted Unitarians. His textbooks expounded the virtues of Unitarian moral philosophy.

However, as a student he was drawn to counter-cultural ideas then in vogue, the so-called “new views” of religion, self and society that were being entertained by a younger generation of Unitarian intellectuals and divines. The Transcendentalists, with whom he came to identify, were generally of the opinion that the religious sentiment is natural and universal in human experience, whereas religious institutions are but parochial and limited forms which this sentiment takes. They also believed that religious truth is known by experience, intuitively, and thus does not depend on religious scriptures or church teachings. They conceived of a natural or absolute religion, shorn of sectarian elements.

Professor Walls has suggested that Thoreau’s purpose in going to live at Walden Pond was “profoundly religious,” and that in writing of his experience he was intending to produce a “scripture for the modern world.” To this, I would add that Walden is not only a religious treatise, it is also a manual of spiritual practice.

Self-culture played a central role in Transcendentalist spirituality. Sometimes termed “the art of life,” for them it meant the cultivation of the soul. “The art of life!” Thoreau wrote in his journal. “Was there anything memorable written on it? By what disciplines to secure the most life, with what care to watch our thoughts.” The disciplines he practiced and described in Walden include leisure, self-reliance, reading, contemplation, solitude, conversation, sauntering in nature, simple living and action from principle. By such practices we may, even today, attempt “to secure the most life.”

As for Thoreau’s religion we should perhaps heed his own admonition: “What is religion?” he queried in his journal. “That which is never spoken.” Part of the difficulty we have in describing Thoreau’s religion is that the word “religion” was only then in the process—one accelerated by the Transcendentalists themselves—of being thought of apart from its historical manifestations in the various faith traditions.

What we can say, I believe, is that his religious views were experiential, nature centered, and pluralistic. God, for him, was immanent rather than transcendent. He was, if anything a nature mystic and a pantheist. He was familiar with the Bible since he read it in Greek at Harvard and frequently drew from Biblical language and imagery in his own writings, but—in my view at least—he was not Christian in any meaningful sense of the word.

Leigh Eric Schmidt argues in his book, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, that the Transcendentalists were responsible for introducing the distinction between religion and spirituality, a prominent feature of religious life today. Thoreau eschewed religious institutions, but was a deeply spiritual person. And this is one of the reasons that many people today find him so appealing. He may have been decried as a heretic and an atheist in his own time, but now he is viewed as the avatar of an alternative way of being religious in the world.

American Transcendentalism is often viewed as a literary movement—a flowering of works written by New England intellectuals who retreated from society and lived in nature. In Transcendentalism and the Cultivation of the Soul, Barry M. Andrews focuses on a neglected aspect of this well-known group, showing how American Transcendentalists developed rich spiritual practices to nurture their souls and discover the divine. The practices are common and simple—among them, keeping journals, contemplation, walking, reading, simple living, and conversation. In approachable and accessible prose, Andrews demonstrates how Transcendentalism’s main thinkers, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller and others, pursued rich and rewarding spiritual lives that inspired them to fight for abolition, women’s rights, and education reform. In detailing these everyday acts, Andrews uncovers a wealth of spiritual practices that could be particularly valuable today, to spiritual seekers and religious liberals.

People often ask me why I am attracted to the Transcendentalists. For the Greeks and Romans, to be a philosopher was not to craft subtle arguments, but to live a philosophical life. As Thoreau said in Walden, “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates.” For the ancients, philosophy was akin to what today we call spirituality. I, too, aspire to live a philosophical or spiritual life, and for me the Transcendentalists offer the best model for doing so.

Their discipline, or praxis, was termed self-culture. For them, culture was not high-brow entertainment, as it is for us today. It did not “consist in polishing or varnishing,” Emerson said. Rather, culture meant cultivation. And the self in question is not the self of modern psychology, but the soul. Self-culture is the cultivation of the soul. Their spiritual exercises included contemplation, solitude, walks in nature, reading, journal writing, conversation, simple living, and action from principle.

Theoria, for the Greeks and Romans, was wisdom gained through contemplation. The wisdom of the Transcendentalists consisted in the belief that there is a cosmos, or unity of nature, including human nature. It is best expressed in these words of Emerson: “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.”

My own spiritual practice has been enriched and guided by what I have learned from the Transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau above all.